The truth behind May Day for me

To me, MayDay MayDay MayDay has always been about Indian soldiers and sailors abandoned to die, in their thousands. In the recent past, it has to do with piracy in the Indian Ocean, and sailors forgotten for years, becoming history. And especially, in a part of India’s forgotten history, when India should by rights be proud of them. Over 20,000 of India’s finest, by most accounts, who perished about 70 years ago.

Those Indian soldiers, their bodies are still being found. Most recently, the Australians identified six, and then helped re-inter them. Here is the official press release:-

Ofcourse, there has been no effort made on the Indian side to try and identify the remains any further. Technology has moved to a point where a single piece of a bone can help ascertain almost everything you want to know about anybody – and the Australians are obviously working their way through the jungles trying to do this for the remains they find. But from this end – nothing.

The official line is that about 10-12000 Indian POWs were transported to New Guinea by the Japanese during WW-II, and more than 9000 of them perished while being forced to work under horrific conditions. The unofficial truth is that atleast that many, if not more, INA soldiers of Indian origin were also transported to New Guinea – and were treated even worse by first the Japanese, and then the Allied troops who liberated the islands towards the end of WW-II.

Very few of the INA troops are said to have survived this double whammy, and those that did were scattered all over the world, which adds to the mysteries surrounding what really happened. While they kept screaming “MayDay MayDay MayDay”.

As we know, May Day is celebrated as International Worker’s Day globally, mostly – and means a holiday if nothing else. It is also a “junglee” kind of spring festival, dating back to pre-Christianity days in pagan Europe, no holds barred and terribly uncivilised. And then, ofcourse, MayDay MayDay MayDay is the globally accepted distress signal for any form of voice transmission – derived from the French phrase “venez m’aider” which means “please come and help me”.

Life onboard Merchant ships is all about working 24x7x365, no May Day holidays, and at the same time, we know how to celebrate life – all the time. Nothing teaches you more that life is short and every day a glory to be thankful for than catching a sunrise and sunset far out in the oceans. You can hear God sing in a happy mood through storms and calms, while he is painting, is the best way to describe it.

Magical, both the twilights, on cargo ships. Something most people will never get to experience on cruise ships, there are far too many people, and this kind of ship also tends to keep too many lights on.

And I may be wrong here, but nowhere else does sunrise and sunset get more magical than in the Equatorial South Pacific, especially in and around the islands that lie strewn like winking jewels in the deep, volcanoes alive every now and then to remind us about the circle of life. Navigating through these deep piracy infested waters in the days before satellite positiong systems for merchant ships was what brought out the best in our skillsets, the waters were mostly calm, and you could go very close to the islands to get a better look.

So there we were one night, weaving our way through the islands, late ’70s, and giving me company just before dawn on the bridge wings of the huge bulker churning it’s way South to Australia for yet another load of coal destined for Japan was our elderly South Korean Radio Officer. Suddenly, out of the deep blue-black of the night, Suh says to me:- “over there, those islands, the Japanese and the Europeans, they eat the Indian people”. Just like that.

Japanese eat Indians? What we had read was that the local population practised cannibalism. Where was this coming in from?

So now Suh, settled down on the little sitout near the port side navigation light, red loom twitching his craggy lined face, told me the story of his life – about how his family had been taken from the paddy fields of North West China, where they used to work as peasants, and transported to Rabaul. He was getting into his teens, and as things emerged, he was soon into the business of trading between the Japanese captors and the Allied Prisoners of War.

No two ways, the Japanese mistreated their POWs, and the labour. That is the way of all wars, POWs are mistreated everywhere. But do they eat their POWs? Depends, said Suh, especially if the captors start losing. Then it becomes open season. Which it did. So the atrocities began.

There were many reasons for this – the disagreement between “General” Mohan Singh and the Japanese had made the INA suspect in the eyes of the Japanese, and the British as well as Americans didn’t really trust the Indians because many of them had moved over to the INA. Also, POW exchanges by the “White Cross” were largely between Japanese and European/Americans, so, in effect, the Indians were at the bottom of the heap, nobody really kept good records on them.

The Indians were being used first as expendable labour for digging what is now estimated to be over 700 kilometres of tunnels and channels under and through the pumice laden hills, some big enough to take battle tanks and tug-boats. And then, when food started running short, the Indians became meat on the move. There are documented records on this in Allied war history.

Rabaul. The whispers about these atrocities are still alive there, from what my shippie friends tell me.

On May Day, I think of those Indian soldiers and sailors in New Guinea shouting MayDay MayDay MayDay. Because, as Suh told me, when they were being eaten before being killed, monkey skull style, they would keep saying “MayDay MayDay MayDay”.

I think the Indian Government may want to review its stand on MayDay. In Rabaul.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

Veeresh Malik, is a fauji brat brought up all over the country. He escaped in 1973 to work as a seafarer globally, then came ashore in 1982 to a variety of stints in India and abroad, some successful, many not. In the last decade as the India head of a small Silicon Valley tech company, he now wants to spend the rest of his life doing not much more than offering unasked for advice and opinions. He has been married (to the same person) for the last 34 years, has two children, one son-in-law and is still looking for the perfect hair-style. He lives in Delhi and does not intend to learn how to set an alarm clock. Also publishing online at Amazon with 9 books to his name.

Veeresh Malik, is a fauji brat brought up all over the country. He escaped in 1973 to work as a seafarer globally, then came ashore in 1982 to a vari. . .

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Veeresh Malik, is a fauji brat brought up all over the country. He escaped in 1973 to work as a seafarer globally, then came ashore in 1982 to a variety of stints in India and abroad, some successful, many not. In the last decade as the India head of a small Silicon Valley tech company, he now wants to spend the rest of his life doing not much more than offering unasked for advice and opinions. He has been married (to the same person) for the last 34 years, has two children, one son-in-law and is still looking for the perfect hair-style. He lives in Delhi and does not intend to learn how to set an alarm clock. Also publishing online at Amazon with 9 books to his name.

Veeresh Malik, is a fauji brat brought up all over the country. He escaped in 1973 to work as a seafarer globally, then came ashore in 1982 to a vari. . .